Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Alien Artifacts On The Moon?

As
nutty as it may seem to the uninitiated, the notion of looking for
alien artifacts on our own Moon may finally be gaining mainstream
scientific traction.
There are good reasons to seriously consider the possibility that at
some point in the Earth-Moon system’s storied 4.5 billion year-old
history, an alien intelligence may have passed through our solar system;
leaving physical artifacts of their visits.

Or so says Paul Davies, a longtime SETI (Search for Extraterrestial
Intelligence) researcher, physicist, and now Director of the Beyond
Center at Arizona State University in Tempe.

The NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At least one related paper on the subject is due to presented at the
September meeting of the UK SETI Research Network, a group of mainstream
British academicians. But even a decade ago, talk of alien lunar
artifacts was mostly beyond the ken of anything remotely resembling the
mainstream astronomical community.
With the success of crowdsourcing, citizen science initiatives such
as SETI@home; Einstein@home; and Cosmology@home however, Davies and a
handful of other serious scientific researchers are now advocating
marrying crowdsourcing analysis with the images now being catalogued by
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO).
Since 2009, LRO has been measuring lunar landforms down to half meter
resolution; in the process targeting more than 10,000 lunar sites and
covering up to 90 percent of the lunar surface. The mission’s current
success has resulted in a treasure trove of thousands of very high
resolution images, almost all of which could be searched via an citizen
science initiative.
Davies thinks the ideal lunar survey would not only include a search
for optical anomalies but would go beyond the breadth of LRO’s own
mission to include searches for evidence of alien lunar industrial
activity.
“[Evidence of past] mining or quarrying could show up in gravimetry
or magnetic surveys, even if an ancient mine was buried under the lunar
regolith,” said Davies. “We could detect [alien] nuclear waste perhaps
from a lunar satellite by looking for localized gamma ray sources from
the lunar surface.”
A crowdsource lunar image analysis initiative might use Tomnod-type
search software in the same way that volunteers were recruited to search
satellite imaging for the missing Malaysian 777.
Davies says at some stage any search needs to be automated and use state-of-the-art software.
“In searching for artifacts, one is looking for ‘something fishy’,”
said Davies. “But ‘fishiness’ requires a human decision in advance about
a signature of artificiality. There are some simple examples, like
right angle edges. But we have little idea what million year-old
technology might look like.”
Yet Andrew Siemion, a research astronomer at the University of
California at Berkeley, says citizen science projects involving image
analysis are relatively straightforward to set up.
“Professional astronomers sometimes suffer from the tendency to
discount anything other than our expected signal as instrumental noise
or some kind of interference,” said Siemion. “When identifying the
unexpected, the eye of an amateur citizen scientist can be just as
effective, if not more so, than that of a conditioned professional.”
Volunteers sifting through images as part of a crowdsourcing effort,
could make their efforts dual purpose. That is, they might look for
orange pyroclastic rocks or even residual vulcanism at the same time
they would look for artificial anomalies.
Davies says a search for lunar artifacts should be combined with a
search for unusual geological features. However improbable, Davies says
planetary scientists need to keep their eyes open for non-random
anomalies; even ones on the moon and scrutinize their respective
databases to “keep an eye out” for putative signatures of alien
technology.

A 1995 academic paper by Ukrainian radio astronomer Alexey
Arkhipov argues that only artifacts larger than one meter in size would
be found on the lunar surface; with objects smaller than that buried by
meters of regolith due to the lunar surface’s continual bombardment by
micrometeorites.
Even so, Davies says, the moon is an attractive environment to search
for artifacts because they would be preserved for much longer than on
Earth (or Mars
). “On Earth, human artifacts get buried in centuries,” said Davies. “On
the Moon it takes millions or tens of millions of years.”
However, Davies thinks the case for jettisoned material or junk is
stronger than a gadget deliberately left for what might be an unknown
and truly immense duration.
Arkhipov argued that the peak of the southern wall of the moon’s
nearside crater “Malapert” would make a logical site for alien
reconnaissance of Earth, since our planet can always be seen from there.
“Given that the moon is a big place, it pays to narrow the search by
such educated guesses,” said Davies. “Lunar lava tubes would preserve
artifacts and also provide an attractive location for equipment to be
shielded from ultraviolet radiation and meteorites.”
When would alien probes have first arrived in our solar system?
Because Earth is only about a third of the age of the universe,
habitable planets in the galaxy could thus have emerged at least 8
billion years ago, says Davies. So, he notes it’s likely that if alien
technology ever entered our solar system, it happened a long time ago.
Assuming that the number of technological extraterrestrial civilizations
remain uniform over time, then Davies says it’s still arguable that our
solar system has been visited at least once during that 8 billion year
timeframe.
Thus, Davies reasons that the average expectation for a visit is of
the order 4 billion years ago and later. But he says even a 100 million
years ago is optimistically the most recent timeframe for their arrival.
And to think they’ve been here since the dawn of recorded human
civilization, he says, would be pretty much a statistical impossibility.
However you cut the numbers, says Davies, you would not expect “recent” visits.
In any event, Davies doesn’t expect that there have been any visits
by flesh and blood entities and if there were, he reckons they would
have moved on. In the event biological entities did travel to actually
colonize a new planet, Davies says they would likely pick one without
burgeoning life forms, due to difficulties co-habitating with any
existing biology.
“My position is that biological intelligence is but a transitory
phase in the evolution of intelligence in the universe,” said Davies.
“Why dispatch fragile biological entities on a hazardous journey across
the vastness of space when almost all the intellectual heavy lifting,
let alone the physical grunt work, will be done by designed systems?”
And Davies says if such a system happened to enter our solar system,
for reasons we cannot even imagine, it may either “stay, go, or
multiply.”
Of course, in science fiction, the most famous alien artifact was the
enigmatic monolith envisioned in Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space
Odyssey.” In the novel and subsequent film, the monolith appears to
reactivate after being found just a few meters under the lunar regolith.
SETI searchers have long considered the possibility that dormant
alien probes may have been sent to our solar system to wait as silent
sentinels before our own technology wakes up to their possible presence.
SETI researchers have even considered the possibility of beaming radio
beacons to the Earth-Sun gravitational Lagrange points in hopes of
“awakening” such unseen probes. That is, if they are out there.
In the last 40 years, before the advent of digital photon counters on
telescopes, there were two relatively cursory searches within both the
Earth-Sun and Earth-Moon Lagrange points, using comparatively small
aperture optical telescopes at Kitt Peak, Arizona and Leuschner
Observatory in California. Both failed to detect any such non-human
artificial objects.
John Gertz, president of the California-based FIRSST (Foundation for Investing
in Research on SETI Science and Technology) initiative, suggests
conducting a radio search for a beacon within our own inner solar system
that would have been activated at the probe’s first detection of
Earth’s own electromagnetic leakage. He thinks it would now be
broadcasting now at very low wattage and would have no message, other
than the implied one, “I am here; and I am artificial.”

Likely smaller than a car, but larger than a grapefruit, Gertz
says the payload, a virtual Encylopedia Galactica — or their
civilization’s complete history and knowledge — could be stored on a
thumb drive which we would literally have to physically retrieve.
This, of course, assumes that the designers of such probes would have
an innate desire to bare their alien souls to an emerging technology
like ours.
“Physical encoding is a very efficient way of transmitting very large
amounts of information from point-to-point,” said Siemion. “So, it is
entirely possible that an advanced civilization might choose to
disseminate large amounts of information via encoded physical
artifacts.”
There may even be more than one such probe waiting for us.
“There is no reason to believe that only one civilization has sent a
probe; there may be a variety of probes out there,” said Gertz.
So, why not look?
“I advocate searching all free searchable databases just for the hell of it,” said Davies.